Word: instinctiveness
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...instinct for the jugular may be the most important drive behind his work. In the back of his mind, Mailer admits, he too has been running for President, and at the very least, the last 25 years have been spent publicly campaigning for the title of Great American Novelist. He entered Harvard at 16, a skinny Brooklyn kid who wanted to study aeronautical engineering. But he discovered Farrell, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck in his first term, and knew then that he wanted to be a novelist. As a junior, he won Story magazine's fiction prize; at the Advocate...
Blackwood is an excellent pianist. In addition to superb technique, he has an uncanny instinct for voicing. This sort of music is so often made to sound like an inchoate mass of notes; Blackwood, aided by his composer's understanding of musical structure, made it come alive...
...admirable as he appears in his own autobiographical fragment, Chiaroscuro, or as bogus as in Aldous Huxley's satirical portrait of him as "John Bidlake" in Point Counter Point. Nicolette writes well, with a painter's eye for places and faces and a feminine instinct for character. These qualities plus Irish wit lend a novelistic point to her portraits of some great period figures...
...Allan Temko, 43, is the hip, peppery critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. He likes to think of himself as a cultural historian with a mass audience. "I have a well-developed jugular instinct when confronted with mediocrity," he says. In the six years he has written for the paper, he has drawn his share of blood. Almost singlehanded, he forced the Catholic Church to revise ultraconventional plans for a new cathedral; he caused the city to change its plans for a bridge spanning south San Francisco Bay. "What a graceful, avant-garde bridge," he says of the finished product...
Success, the souvenir detectors believe, is a matter of historical background as well as on-the-scene instinct. Gene Purcell, 26, a seasoned detection expert and proprietor of the Blockade Runners, an Atlanta shop that deals in sales or swaps of Civil War accouterments, outlines the procedure. "I get me a spot on a battlefield," he says, "and I go sit down and lean up against a tree and smoke a cigarette, and I think, 'If I were fighting here, where would 1 have dragged a wounded man? Over behind that big rock.' So I detect there...